All citizens should be able to fill their plate with nutritious, safe, sustainable and affordable food but Europe’s urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of such food, especially for deprived and vulnerable groups. Such challenges converge within local food environments but are often neglected by public planners. Promising initiatives taken by municipalities to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the wider policy context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are: (1) siloed ways of working and (2) fragmentation of knowledge on facilitators and barriers related to food system transformation. These factors hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies.
To help increase access to sustainable food in Aarhus, some non-profit organisations are teaching school students how to create meals made out of surplus food ingredients. These meals are then donated to people in need, such as people experiencing homelessness. Not only do these initiatives promote sustainable food consumption but they also increase students’ cooking skills, tackle food waste and reduce food insecurity among people who would benefit from receiving meals. Working with the Det Kærlige Måltid and Skraldecafeen, this study will apply ethnographic research methods combined with interviews to understand the role that these types of organisations play in supporting Aarhus’s food system in becoming more sustainable by examining the impact they have on encouraging sustainable food intake and addressing food insecurity while tackling food waste.
The project is linked to a large EU project called FOODCLIC which supports multi-stakeholder engagement, including deprived and vulnerable groups, and will lead to creating more sustainable urban food environments by building strong science–policy–practice interfaces (i.e. food policy networks) and experimenting with innovative approaches and business models in Living Labs.
The project is aligned to UN's SGD:
